J
I am a great fan of this list, because I believe that it has a promising future. For the moment time and lack of experience programming in Linux has been the main restrictions for contributing in the code of this project, I hope in the future to be able with some tuition from the group to collaborate. For now I will try to help commenting on some issues that I think may be relevant. Is there any OPC effort in GPL for Linux, because in my opinion this is a great way of taking this project to the factory floor. I am not saying that it is the only way, just that it is a good way. This is a good link between a PLC of x brand and all the well known HMI, we could later develop an alternate GPL equivalent instead of OLE if OLE is a problem of conflict in license (I am talking here without knowing how this private-GPL licenses can be used or combined). It is not likely that a customer with an installed base for his automation is going to throw everything and reinstall all in GPL software even if it is free. If we develop an HMI as has been said on other messages, we may also need to support OPC to integrate with proprietary hardware. But for now I think is more important for the LPLC to be able to connect to HMI's via OPC. It is also not likely in the near future to substitute OPC with a GPL standard. By the way isn't OPC supposed to be open? In that case we do not need to replace it and just embrace it for our project. Juan Carlos Orozco ACElab Industrial Automation [email protected] www.ace-lab.com -----Mensaje original----- De: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]En nombre de Perry Sink Jeff, >> I am eager to see what can be done with this. I do >> integration work in the PLC realm and have been >> waiting to finally find something like this. >> Is this ready for plantfloor testing, or when will it >> be? I see that there is discussion as to using lp >> connections. >> Is there going to be connectivity to existing plc >> networks? There are several vendors who have Linux drivers written for their cards -- SST, Synergetic/Hilscher, Phoenix, and maybe some others as well. Most of the popular buses are covered. >> How about OPC? Has some rendering of COM been ported >> to Linux? Intrinsyc software (http://www.intrinsyc.com/) has Linux OPC servers they have written (not GPL, I'm almost certain) which allow an OPC server and an OPC client to be separated by a network or even by the internet, around the world. One or both of them can be non-windows as well -- I just talked to one of their senior product developers yesterday at the NMW trade show. I doubt this is much use to this list per se, but at least it can be done. Perry Sink Synergetic _______________________________________________ LinuxPLC mailing list [email protected] http://linuxplc.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxplc